Irish Poems

In time for St. Patrick’s Day— a treasury of poetry from the Emerald Isle, stretching back fourteen centuries.

From the romantic ballad to the rebel song, from devotional Christian verse to revivals of ancient Celtic myth, poetry has long been Ireland’s most eloquent response to its turbulent and colorful history. Irish Poems gives us a dazzling selection from Ireland’s long and distinguished poetic tradition, ranging from the earliest Gaelic bards through Jonathan Swift, Oliver Goldsmith, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney. If it is true, as Yeats once observed, that “We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry,” then lovers of poetry can only be grateful for the dynamic and vigorous culture that has given us such a glorious literary outpouring.